ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Astronomers have discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field -- so-called gravitational microlensing.

Scientists have now begun to announce the first results from the analysis of a handful of dirt that Hayabusa2 managed to scoop off the surface of a speeding asteroid. What they found suggests that this asteroid is a piece of the same stuff that coalesced into our sun four-and-a-half billion years ago.

Brown dwarfs, mysterious objects that straddle the line between stars and planets, are essential to our understanding of both stellar and planetary populations. However, only 40 brown dwarfs could be imaged around stars in almost three decades of searches. An international team has directly imaged a remarkable four new brown dwarfs thanks to a new innovative search method.

Extensively used grassland is host to a high degree of biodiversity, and performs an important climate protection function as a carbon sink and also serves for fodder and food production. However, these ecosystem services are jeopardized if productivity on these lands is maximized and their use therefore intensified. Researchers have now described how satellite data and machine learning methods enable to assess land-use intensity.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 mission returned uncontaminated primitive asteroid samples to Earth. A comprehensive analysis of 16 particles from the asteroid Ryugu revealed many insights into the processes that operated before, during and after the formation of the solar system, with some still shaping the surface of the present-day asteroid. Elemental and isotopic data revealed that Ryugu contains the most primitive pre-solar nebular (an ancient disk of gas and dust surrounding what would become the Sun) material yet identified and that some organic materials may have been inherited from before the solar system formed.

A recently discovered, rare and persistent rapid-fire fast radio burst source -- sending out an occasional and informative cosmic ping from more than 3.5 billion light years away -- helps to reveal the secrets of the broiling hot space between the galaxies.

A new study offers direct evidence showing where near-light speed particle acceleration occurs inside the largest explosion known in the solar system, the solar flare.

Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have revealed how certain particle-jets lose energy as they traverse the unique form of nuclear matter created in these collisions. The results should help them learn about key 'transport properties' of this hot particle soup, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP).

Astronomers have developed a new code to simulate the formation of a cluster of baby stars. Comparison with the well-known real case of the Orion Nebula shows that its off-center bubble of ionized gas was caused by a massive star that was pushed out of the newborn cluster but is now falling back in.